How Would You Make WoW Harder?

I was browsing through another thread here that was all about how the game is "too easy" now. It made some good points but didn't really offer any insight in how they should put some difficulty back into the game.

First I think you have to define difficulty. For some people it means inaccessibility, for others it means having their actual gameplay skills pushed to the limit, and still others consider it a matter of time and effort. Is it a combination of the three or some variation on them?

So tell me how you define difficulty in World of Warcraft, then say what you would do to turn it up a notch.

For me I think it's about gameplay skills. I've been wanting something like Proving Grounds and/or Brawler's Guild for a long time and I think it will be a great way to really test that. But it's certainly not the only thing that adds challenge to the game.

I would up the mechanics of 10man, that shit is ez-mode and was a joke in cata.

you can't fix "it's too easy" problems because players have been playing WoW for years (almost a decade for some) and they have 1000's of hours of conditioning to blizzards mechanics. What you can fix is a problem that plagues all video games which are easy to achieve/easy to get aspects by making certain aspects of the game more challenging again. That's why I choose upping the difficulty of 10man raiding. Going from heroic 25man to heroic 10man is like doing heroic LK at lvl 90. (slightly over exaggerated but you get the point)

That's my belief on the slow death of 25man raiding is that 10man is too easily accessible to the average gamer. Less people required, lower difficulty settings even for heroic mode, quicker progression, etc.

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind
Raiding is 25 man only

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind
Raiding is 25 man only

Only problem would be that there wouldn't even be 25 people in total on such a realm

Players ask for everything to be faster, easier and completely optional and then when they get bored they can't understand why.

I would up the mechanics of 10man, that shit is ez-mode and was a joke in cata.

you can't fix "it's too easy" problems because players have been playing WoW for years (almost a decade for some) and they have 1000's of hours of conditioning to blizzards mechanics. What you can fix is a problem that plagues all video games which are easy to achieve/easy to get aspects by making certain aspects of the game more challenging again. That's why I choose upping the difficulty of 10man raiding. Going from heroic 25man to heroic 10man is like doing heroic LK at lvl 90. (slightly over exaggerated but you get the point)

That's my belief on the slow death of 25man raiding is that 10man is too easily accessible to the average gamer. Less people required, lower difficulty settings even for heroic mode, quicker progression, etc.

You're cute.
10 man being easier (very debatable) is NOT the reason why 25 man raiding is declining in population, it's a lot more convenient to find 10 people to start your own raiding team then it is to find 25 people, it's more convenient while at the same time reward is somewhat the same.
Actual difficulty has nothing to do with it, in fact, I'd go so far to say that this tier, during progression, 10 man was tuned tighter then 25 man was.

Oh and to people whining how current tier is easy, like what drugs are you on, Blizzard did an AMAZING job this tier, I'd argue this has been one of the finest tiers created to date (Yeah Ulduar was nice and all, but realistically, except for overtuned pre nerf Yogg 0, mimiron and freya hard mode were only hard fights in it).
Sure now that gear levels are as high as 540 or 550 with legendary cloaks and meta gems fights are a lot easier then they were back during progress with actual ilvl fights were created for(-40,-30), but that's why blizzard added those things, to let people catch up, and it worked out great as we can see really big number of guilds clearing the instance to it's fullest.

I mentioned Ulduar since everyone usually remembers Ulduar as most amazing and hardest instance evah!

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind

None of that makes it harder. It just makes it ridiculously inconvenient to play. Inconvenient != harder.

I don't know why it has to be harder. There are already plenty of challenging things to do: challenge modes with leaderboards, heroic scenarios, brawler's guild, and heroic raiding.

The game is plenty hard already. To many people who have played for 3+ years and have mastered the game to the extreme are unable to understand how insanely good they are at the game and how bad the avarage players is. Making the game harder would do nothing but basically kill it.

Flat 150% increase in mob strength
50% + in required experience per level
No LFG or LFR
No crossrealm features of any kind
Weak, slow spawning guards
Flying mounts have a 10 second cast time and require to be out of pvp combat for 2 minutes
No transfer services of any kind, must level up from beginning if start on server
No badges / points / valor of any kind
Raiding is 25 man only

Most of these are good points, though I think having both a 10 second cast time and a 2 minute cooldown after PvP action is too big a punishment for miners/herbalists. I'd say keep the 1.5s cast time instead.

I would also rework the Honor system so that Honor gains from World PvP kills are worth way more than Battleground kills. Maybe add some World PvP events as well - something similar to Wintergrasp but accessible to everyone without gating or queues, and with less focus on completing objectives (e.g. first faction with 500 kills wins). It would require servers to have equal faction populations though.

Heck, maybe even add achievements for killing a certain amount of players in World PvP.

Hm..was it a Final Fantasy game where you basically needed a group to quest and couldn't solo anything? Was it GW 1 where mobs weren't leashed and if you pulled too many / hard mobs, you just died no matter where you ran.

I don't think it is difficult to make the game balls hard. But is it fun if only people can level in this game who now raid? Why does levelling need to be hard. And endgame raiding IS hard.

i wouldn't let the "pros" who call wow too easy without 13/13 hc talk whatever shit they want to talk, i can say lifting weights is too easy i can lift infinite tons, doesn't mean i can do it, but i can still call it too easy and never do it just like all the people who call wow too easy.

I'd leave the hardest part of the game as is more or less (heroic raiding, challenge modes, brawler's guild)

And I'd spread the gameplay challenges quite a bit more evenly / progressively in the 99% of content that's left.

Because at the moment the difficulty of the 1% of the game content is just a veil and a easy cop-out for 99% of it being a snorefest.

Or that same tired argument about content aimed at people who are not you is getting to be rather a "snorefest" because you cannot come up with a new and original discussion.

The "difficult" content of heroic raiding, brawlers guild, challenge modes, are only being cleared while current by a small portion of the player base.
What good does it do spreading out and wasting even more resources on content that an ever smaller portion of the player base would be able to participate in properly.

I believe that the discrepancy arises from the fact that it all seems to be centered in one area. Leveling is easy, heroic dungeons are easy, LFR is easy, dailies are easy and then you try normal and heroic raids and BAM!!, you hit the proverbial brick wall.